The structure of the Caenorhabditis elegans manganese superoxide dismutase MnSOD-3-azide complex.

C. elegans MnSOD-3 has been implicated in the longevity pathway and its mechanism of catalysis is relevant to the aging process and carcinogenesis. The structures of MnSOD-3 provide unique crystallographic evidence of a dynamic region of the tetrameric interface (residues 41-54).

The spatiotemporal characteristics of the attentional shift relative to a reach.

While the attentional shift preceding a saccadic eye movement has been well documented, the mechanisms surrounding the attentional shift preceding a reach are not well understood. It is unknown whether these mechanisms may be the same as those used in perceptual tasks, or those used in the planning of a saccade. We mapped the spatiotemporal properties of attention relative to a reach to determine the time course of attentional facilitation for hand movements alone.

The ontogeny of color: developmental origins of divergent pigmentation in Drosophila americana and D. novamexicana.

Pigmentation is a model trait for evolutionary and developmental analysis that is particularly amenable to molecular investigation in the genus Drosophila. To better understand how this phenotype evolves, we examined divergent pigmentation and gene expression over developmental time in the dark-bodied D. americana and its light-bodied sister species D.

Intraspecific polymorphism to interspecific divergence: genetics of pigmentation in Drosophila.

Genetic changes contributing to phenotypic differences within or between species have been identified for a handful of traits, but the relationship between alleles underlying intraspecific polymorphism and interspecific divergence is largely unknown. We found that noncoding changes in the tan gene, as well as changes linked to the ebony gene, contribute to pigmentation divergence between closely related Drosophila species. Moreover, we found that alleles linked to tan and ebony fixed in one Drosophila species also contribute to variation within another species, and that multiple genotypes underlie similar phenotypes even within the same population.

Purification, crystallization and X-ray structures of the two manganese superoxide dismutases from Caenorhabditis elegans.

Caenorhabditis elegans expresses two manganese superoxide dismutase enzymes (MnSOD-2 and MnSOD-3) that are targeted to the mitochondrion. MnSOD-2 is constitutively expressed, while synthesis of MnSOD-3 is inducible. The structures of these two mononuclear metalloenzymes have been determined to 1.